Monday News: Oliver Rips Trump for Not Disavowing Nazis; “When the President Is Un-American”; “RPV Has An Important Choice For 2018”

Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Monday, August 14. Check out John Oliver ripping “f*cking idiot” Trump – “It doesn’t get easier than disavowing Nazis.”

The Hate He Dares Not Speak Of (“White supremacists see President Trump’s failure to condemn them as a sign of implicit support. Which of course it is.”)

White House confronts backlash over Trump’s original remarks on Charlottesville (To quote Tom Perriello: “Are we open to the possibility that the President is a white supremacist and authoritarian, not that he failed to get the statement right?” Also, “Trump can start to prove he’s not a white supremacist, but it’ll take pink slips, not public statements. Must remove Bannon, Gorka & Miller.”)

Suspect in Va. death was a Nazi sympathizer, teacher says (“James Alex Fields Jr., the 20-year-old suspect accused of second-degree murder for plowing a car into a crowd of activists in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday, espoused extremist ideals and idolized Adolf Hitler, according to his high school history teacher Derek Weimer.”)

Why Trump Can’t Say the Obvious (“But then, we have never had a president, of either party, or any political persuasion, so utterly disconnected from any understanding of our national history, of the still-unresolved fights over what it means to be a ‘real’ American. Nor have we ever had a president who combines staggering historical and political ignorance with language skills that rank him somewhere around a indolent 9-year old.” Right, and a good chunk of his base holds bigoted views of various sorts.)

Take the Statues Down (“A multi-ethnic democracy requires grappling honestly with the past—and recognizing the symbols of the Confederacy for what they are.”)

Trump aides predicting ‘brutal’ September (“Aides hope to use meetings in New York this week to figure out their plans for the debt ceiling, 2018 budget, tax reform, infrastructure spending and perhaps another stab at repealing Obamacare.”)

How the GOP Can Prove It Isn’t a Party for White Supremacists (“For half-a-century, the GOP has deliberately exploited — and inflamed — white racial animus, as a means of obtaining political power. That isn’t partisan hyperbole; it’s historical fact. In 1964, the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights left most of the white South (and hefty portions of the white North) without a political home. This development provided Republicans with a great opportunity, so long as they were sufficiently cynical — or reactionary — to exploit it.”)

Trump Joins the Neo-Confederates (“There is a sinister congruence between the president’s reaction to the white-supremacist riot in Charlottesville yesterday and the object the rioters assembled to defend: the city’s doomed Robert E. Lee statue. Both are manifestations of Neo-Confederacy, the fierce, century-long effort of the Southern ruling class to normalize white racism so long as it did not degenerate into extralegal violence.”)

RPV Has An Important Choice For 2018 (“And now as of this writing Corey Stewart is the leading candidate to be the party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate in 2018. This is an enormous problem.”)